A percentage of a banquet is not a delivery fee. Zayos charges you neither.
Zayos gives a San Francisco Chinese restaurant commission free ordering on its own domain for a flat $499, $599 or $699 a month per location. Dim sum sells by the piece, banquets book with a deposit, and the diner pays $0.99 pickup or $2.99 delivery at checkout.
Free. About 60 seconds. No card.
Why does a marketplace cost a Chinese kitchen more than it costs a sandwich counter?
Because a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco is not running one business. It is running three, and a percentage of the ticket taxes all of them at the same rate even though they cost you completely different things to produce. A sandwich counter has one order shape. You have a weeknight family order, a weekend dim sum service sold by the piece, and a round table banquet booked days ahead for twelve people. The third one carries most of the year’s profit and is the one a percentage hurts most.
Here is the same month of orders through both models. Marketplace cost is modeled at a 28 percent blended rate, the midpoint of the 25 to 35 percent blended range that operators actually pay once delivery, in app marketing and card processing are stacked on the 15 to 30 percent base commission.
| Order shape | Ticket | App takes | You keep on Zayos |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weeknight family order Two entrees, a noodle, a soup, rice for four. Ordered by the same household most Tuesdays. Roughly four times a month, all year | $52 | $15 | $52 |
| Weekend dim sum, sold by the piece Fourteen steamer items, priced individually, ordered for pickup between 9am and noon on a Saturday. Weekend mornings only, a hard prep window | $78 | $22 | $78 |
| Round table banquet Ten courses for twelve people. A birthday, a full month celebration, a Lunar New Year table. Booked five days out. A handful a month, most of the annual profit | $900 | $252 | $900 |
Modeled figures, not a customer result. On Zayos the diner pays the service fee at checkout, $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine in, 10 percent on catering and banquet orders. The restaurant keeps 100 percent of food revenue and tips.
San Francisco capped commission at 15 percent. So why is the invoice still 28?
San Francisco was the first major American city to make a delivery commission cap permanent, at 15 percent, in 2021. Operators here reasonably assumed that ended the argument. It did not, because the cap governs one line on the invoice. Everything the apps built afterward sits outside it: marketing tiers, expanded reach tiers, promoted placement, and a growing pile of fees charged to the diner that make your food look more expensive than it is.
The result is a choice nobody wants. Stay on the capped base tier and your listing falls behind the restaurants that bought placement. Buy the placement back and your blended cost climbs toward what a restaurant in a city with no cap pays anyway. Owners on Clement Street and in the Sunset describe the same thing: they are paying for the same neighborhood regular, over and over, at a rate that has quietly returned to where it started.
A flat monthly fee has no tier to buy back. At $599 a month, your cost is the same on your busiest Lunar New Year week and your slowest Tuesday in February.
How do you take a twelve person round table order online?
A banquet is not a delivery. It is a reservation with a menu attached, and it breaks every assumption a marketplace is built on. Nobody dispatches a driver for a ten course table. The order arrives days early, carries a headcount, and needs a kitchen to say yes or no based on how many tables it has already taken that night. Four things make it work on your own site.
A lead time you set, not a thirty minute promise
Banquet items carry their own lead time window. Set five days for a full ten course table, forty eight hours for a roast, and the storefront will not accept an order that lands inside the window. The kitchen stops fielding the Friday afternoon call asking for a Saturday night table it cannot prep.
A deposit, taken at booking
Large table orders get cancelled. A deposit collected on the site at the moment of booking is the difference between a no show costing you a phone call and a no show costing you twelve portions of food you already bought.
A nightly cap on how many tables you accept
You decide the ceiling. Two banquets on a Friday, four on a Saturday, none on the night your head chef is off. When the count is reached the option closes on the site by itself, which is a thing no marketplace listing will ever do for you.
One form that captures the whole table
Headcount, courses, arrival time, allergies, whether they are bringing a cake, the phone number of the person who booked it. Written once by the customer, read once by the kitchen. Banquet and catering orders carry a 10 percent fee that the diner pays at checkout. You keep the full food revenue.
Can a dim sum service be sold by the piece before it sells out?
Dim sum is a batch business on a clock. Steamers come up in the morning, a good Saturday sells through by early afternoon, and the count of any single item is finite. A menu built for burritos handles none of that. On Zayos every steamer item is a line with its own price and its own daily count, so har gow going out at 11:40am closes on the website at 11:40am instead of taking three more orders you have to phone back and cancel.
The ordering window is yours too. Open Saturday and Sunday from 8am, cut off at noon, offer pickup slots in fifteen minute blocks so twelve families are not all standing at the counter at 10:30. That is a better morning for the front counter than any app has ever given a dim sum house.
What happens to an Irving Street kitchen when an algorithm draws the radius?
San Francisco’s Chinese dining is not confined to one neighborhood, and it has not been for a long time. Chinatown, the oldest in North America, still anchors it. But a huge share of the everyday family volume now sits on Clement Street in the Richmond and along Irving, Noriega and Taraval in the Sunset. Those are neighborhood kitchens with citywide reputations, and their customers will drive.
Marketplace visibility does not care about reputation. It is tied to delivery distance and driver time, which quietly favors dense downtown blocks and buries a Sunset kitchen in a search from two miles away. Your own site is not ranked by driver proximity. A pickup first storefront with an honest ready time serves the customer who was always going to drive, and puts the person who drove into a customer list you own rather than an app account you rent.
The discovery layer carries Chinese language name variants in the page schema, so a diner searching in Chinese can land on your restaurant instead of a marketplace category page. Menu items can show characters and English together, which also cuts the calls that begin with somebody describing a dish they cannot spell.
Who is running Zayos right now?
One restaurant is live and taking orders on Zayos today: Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, which keeps $48k+/yr that used to leave as commission at roughly 3,000 orders a month. Storefronts are built and ordering opens at launch for Shishka Lebanese Grill, La Vie Mediterranean, Yummy Grill, aura, Courtyard Cafe, Mr. Smoke across 13 locations, Yalla Market and Tap That Ash.
There is no San Francisco Chinese restaurant on the platform yet, and we are not going to write you a fake one. Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida company, and San Francisco is a market we serve from South Florida. Most operators are live in under 2 weeks and take their first direct order within a week of signing up.
Deeper on the menu mechanics, combo logic and modifier trees for this kind of kitchen: online ordering for Chinese restaurants. The whole city view, neighborhood by neighborhood: San Francisco restaurant online ordering. Plans and the full fee table: pricing.
Questions San Francisco Chinese restaurant owners ask.
San Francisco capped delivery commission at 15 percent. Why is my bill still so high?
Can I take a ten course banquet order on my own site?
How does dim sum work if every item is priced by the piece?
My restaurant is out in the Sunset. Does that hurt me on the apps?
Will diners who search in Chinese find my ordering page?
What does Zayos cost, and what does the diner pay?
Do I have to leave DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub to do this?
Is there a San Francisco Chinese restaurant on Zayos I can call?
Run one Saturday through the numbers.
The free report takes your own order count and average ticket, including the banquets, and compares it to a flat monthly fee over a year.